What you can look up
Dream traditions across East Asia and Europe built up detailed vocabularies of symbols, and this dictionary collects them by category — water, animals, falling, teeth, being chased, the dead, money, weather and so on. Each entry gives the traditional reading rather than a single word, because the same symbol has usually been read more than one way depending on what it was doing in the dream.
Why the context matters more than the symbol
The single most useful thing to record about a dream is not the object but the feeling. Water read as wealth in one context and as emotional flooding in another; the difference is whether you were swimming or drowning. The dictionary entries are written to make that distinction explicit, so before you search, try to recall three things: what the symbol was doing, whether you were watching or participating, and how you felt at the moment you woke.
Which dreams are worth reading
Most dreams are the night shift filing the day, and traditions have always known this. The ones worth interpreting tend to share a few features: they repeat, they carry an unusually strong feeling that survives waking, or they contain an image that feels borrowed from somewhere other than your recent life. A dream you have three times in a month is telling you something about your waking life whether or not you believe in dream symbolism.
Questions people ask
Dreaming of death is almost never about death — across most traditions it reads as the ending of a phase, and dreaming of a living person's death often reads as that relationship changing shape. Recurring nightmares tend to track unresolved daytime pressure rather than prophecy. And if you want the dictionary to be useful, write the dream down before you check it: the act of reaching for words fixes details that dissolve within minutes of waking, and those details are usually where the meaning is.